Mark makes a feeble attempt at staying alive...
Talking to the head of Warfighters – himself an avid Ghost Recon player – on the car ride back to the barracks, was something of an eye opener. Our session had lasted but an hour, though he eulogised happily about full-on afternoons of Warfighters action, involving heavily planned campaigns with specific mission objectives and limited (sometimes no) respawns.
The most interesting aspect, however, was his obvious passion for both real-life and digital war representations. Playing GRAW, he insisted, gave him plenty of ideas for campaigns, tactics and general movement in the Warfighters setup – while Warfighters, too, lent him a greater appreciation of the depth, balance and aesthetic qualities of the BAFTA award-winning game series.
Having said that, GRAW 1's multiplayer was not without its critics. Worked on by a separate development team to the singleplayer campaign, many felt that the two modes lacked a sense of cohesion, with the far more robust story offering the more accomplished of the two experiences. With Advanced Warfighter 2 Ubisoft appear to have listened to these concerns, and have produced a significantly improved frag fest this time around which feels instantly closer to it's plot-led sister mode.
Playing games in a vehicle is always an odd experience I find – even a DS in the car sometimes gives me problems. So you can imagine how surreal it felt to play GRAW in the back of an all-purpose army APV, replete with plasma TV's and wired Xbox 360 pads. Nontheless, it couldn't help but add to the authenticity as our ragtag team pitted themselves against… well, another equally unimposing group of games journo types.
The experience was an exhilarating one. The frantic, tactical squad action GRAW is famed for seems to have been given a speedier edge this time around, and no sooner had we picked our character types in the pre-match menu (I opted for the heavy-duty Grenadier option) then we were swiftly into the fray, co-ordinating attacks with half-panicked shouts and positioning the drone with a simple upwards press of the D-pad to recon the positions of enemy forces.
The great thing playing as a grenadier, I found, was that the series' penchant for frustrating fast deaths can be turned to your advantage when you're carrying a hulking great rocket launcher. Indeed, it's a great way of taking out even crackshot snipers encamped on a high ridge, who otherwise assumed they were safe from enemy fire. On the other hand, losing said high ground can often prove severely limiting to the team's efficiency, particularly with two many heavy artillery types plodding around down below at sluglike speeds, and unseen far off foes picking you off on a whim.
GRAW multiplayer, then, remains a game of balance – exacerbated massively by more variety and verticality in level design than last year's efforts. Our session saw our team reign supreme on a flaming, red-skied, wreckage strewn evening desert landscape, take it to the enemy on what looked like a giant oil facility, and get positively pounded on a level where we found ourselves pinned in the docks by unrelenting barrages of hostile fire from a central stone castle.
Considering the multitude of multiplayer gametypes – we tried but team deathmatch and a counterstrike-esque bomb planting one, with several more team and solo styles promised in the final build – and the list of new content, it's all looking very promising. Clan support, healing of team mates, 18 multiplayer maps and six co-op missions all make GRAW 2 multiplayer an attractive prospect, and should dispel fears of it being 'just a lazy annual update'.
And of course, it all looks truly spectacular; characters moving fluidly, bullets leaving trails in their wake, foliage appearing to rustle as you pass through it, and explosions conveying sheer bedlam as well as anything in the genre. The odd occasional framerate issue aside, this is easily one of the best looking multiplayer renditions on 360, and if the net code stands up like the System Link play did, then it will be up there with Gears' as one of Xbox Live's premier titles. And, considering how close GRAW gets to the real thing, it will be deservedly so. Believe me; I know!
Review by: Mark Scott
Review Published: 22.02.07